Buzzword Bingo

RSS feed

The Buzzword Bingo forum is a place to post examples of ludicrous,
convoluted and meaningless buzzwords and marketing drivel dreamed up by those seeking to sound
more important and meaningful than they actually are.

We are developers, which means our job is to simplify complicated and ill-expressed requirements
in order to produce something elegant and useful. If you want to impress us then please just tell it
to us straight. The less pre-processing we have to do the more we will be interested.

E.g. "The Business will have to decide what it wants to do". The definition of "The Business" changes every time it is used. It could mean the CEO it could mean the Project Management team, it could mean the board.

"You should let The Business know about that project" I always ask for their current definition of the business.

I heard a user describe a new piece of software the business is buying as 'drag and drop'.

Or to paraphrase what he said "it's a good piece of software it's drag and drop".
In my previous job, the head of the department was always raving about how great the software was because it was 'drag and drop'.

This is why software should not be left to users to design, what the software does bears no relevance to it's worth.
All that seems to matter is some superficial aspect of the user interface.

I think I am going to invent a new term for user interfaces for extracting data - "squeeze and dump".
It says it all really - the crap you put into the system will be dumped into a file type of your choosing.

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”

1) Any use in the plural - as in "These key pivots" - because if you have multiple pivots you will be eccentric and unstable.

2) Actually you mean "Fulcrum" if you are using a lever metaphor, which is nearly always the case. Also - why do managers use the lever metaphor to imply getting something for nothing? You aren't - you are swapping distance for force....oh wait, maybe I see now.

In stores in my country you often see signs saying: "Discount: Save -25%" and "A discount of -25% are withdrawn at checkout". I always avoid such arithmetic discounts and insist on going for only 100% checkouts when in the grocery store and elsewhere. I feel that 125% is sligthly over the top

At a past company our CEO liked to use this saying "Win the War and THEN Fight the Battle". It used to drive a colleague of mine (a developer) absolutely mad when he was told to "Win the war and then fight the battle" during a project or when he was being rebuked.

In addition to this I made sure that the saying appeared in various places around the office, his start up screen, desktop, screensaver, posters in the office... I even got his mother to post one on his bedroom door... was especially proud of that achievement.

The war is convincing/threatening/bullying your workforce until 95% of them agree with you. You can then focus on the battle of wearing down (demoralising until they leave?) the 5% that know that you're talking crap.

Then, and only then, can you take your position on the company throne (so to speak)

How do you know so much about swallows? Well, you have to know these things when you're a king, you know.